How can I get rhythmbox to see that different albums with the same name are different?

Out of the box, rhythmbox does not have the ability to differentiate between different "greatest hits" albums because it treats album titles as the unique identifier.

Through the rhythmbox plugin coverart-browser, we treat both the album-title AND the album-artist as the unique identifier.

As the picture shows - two artists with the same "greatest hits" titles but the albums are shown separately since the two albums are by different artists.

You should note - when ripping CD's, often the album-artist is not ripped and is left blank.

Worse still, for multi-artist albums (compilations), both the album-artist and artist fields are also left empty. Thus you can be left with two albums with exactly the same title.

The trick here is to select all the tracks for an album, right-click and choose properties and then fill in the album-artist field to make it unique

See the links below for installation instructions.

Linked Question:

• How to browse by album art in rhythmbox?
• How do I install third-party rhythmbox plugins?

I have seen this problem on a variety of systems and with different players and the only solution I have come up with is to name the albums prefixed by the artist.

For example:

"Red Hot Chilli Peppers Greatest Hits " instead of just "Greatest Hits".

I know its a lot of work but if someone has a better way I would love to hear it.

You cannot do this in Rhythmbox. However, I would consider it a bug that this happens. You should open a bug about it upstream, if one is not already opened. What it should do, is sort by album, then album artist, then artist, then disc number, then by track number, when you sort by album. However, it is not currently doing this.

Select all the tracks from the album, right click, choose properties. Don't change the artist or album tag. Set "album artist" if you like, or click on the "sorting" tab. Here, you can set an artist and album tag that will not be displayed, but will be used specifically for sorting. If you set "Album sort order" to "greatest hits 1" for example, and set it to "greatest hits 2" for the other album, they would still both show up as "Greatest Hits" in the library, but would be sorted as separate albums. Better solution would be to change the "artist sort order" field to the corresponding artist's name. This is also a good solution for albums with multiple artists.

You can also use this if you like your albums sorted chronologically, as Rhythmbox doesn't have the "album by year" feature that I've only ever seen in iTunes.

Sorting your library using the "Artist" heading rather than "Album" would solve this problem much more easily; your albums will still be sorted alphabetically, with their tracks in order, and albums by the same artist will be grouped together. That way Offspring and Queen wouldn't even be near each other, let alone all mixed up like that.

I know this question is pretty old, but no one seems to have posted this solution. Hope I helped someone.

I'm a developer and added 'sort by artist' to 'rhythmdb_query_model_album_sort_func' - see below.

If you are an end user able to prepare your system for package building, patch the source, build new packages, install then go ahead! ;-).

This patch was done with rb v2.97, newer versions may have different line numbers (didn't check that yet) but basically the code should be the same.

Description: sort albums with same title first by artist, remove unnecesary space and tab
--- rhythmbox-2.97.orig/rhythmdb/rhythmdb-query-model.c
+++ rhythmbox-2.97/rhythmdb/rhythmdb-query-model.c
@@ -2192,7 +2192,7 @@ rhythmdb_query_model_drag_data_received
        return FALSE;
 }

-/* 
+/*
  * determines whether reordering is possible by checking up
  * the chain for a model with a sort function set.
  */
@@ -2921,7 +2921,7 @@
  * @data: nothing
  *
  * Sort function for sorting by album.  Sorts by album, then
- * disc number, then track number, then title.
+ * artist, then disc number, then track number, then title.
  *
  * Returns: result of sort comparison between a and b.
  */
@@ -2959,6 +2959,31 @@ rhythmdb_query_model_album_sort_func (Rh
        if (ret != 0)
                return ret;

+       /* Then by artist */
+        a_val = rhythmdb_entry_get_string (a, RHYTHMDB_PROP_ARTIST_SORTNAME_SORT_KEY);
+        if (a_val[0] == '\0') {
+                a_val = rhythmdb_entry_get_string (a, RHYTHMDB_PROP_ARTIST_SORT_KEY);
+        }
+        b_val = rhythmdb_entry_get_string (b, RHYTHMDB_PROP_ARTIST_SORTNAME_SORT_KEY);
+        if (b_val[0] == '\0') {
+                b_val = rhythmdb_entry_get_string (b, RHYTHMDB_PROP_ARTIST_SORT_KEY);
+        }
+
+        if (a_val == NULL) {
+                if (b_val == NULL)
+                        ret = 0;
+                else
+                        ret = -1;
+        } else if (b_val == NULL)
+                ret = 1;
+        else
+                ret = strcmp (a_val, b_val);
+
+        if (ret != 0)
+                return ret;
+        /*else
+                return rhythmdb_query_model_album_sort_func (a, b, data); */
+
        /* Then by disc number (assume 1 if non-existent) */
        a_num = rhythmdb_entry_get_ulong (a, RHYTHMDB_PROP_DISC_NUMBER);
        b_num = rhythmdb_entry_get_ulong (b, RHYTHMDB_PROP_DISC_NUMBER);
@@ -3168,7 +3193,7 @@
                                    gpointer data)
 {
        gulong a_val, b_val;
-       
+
        if (rhythmdb_entry_is_lossless (a)) {
                if (rhythmdb_entry_is_lossless (b))
                        return rhythmdb_query_model_location_sort_func (a, b, data);

Further instructions on package building here and here

Yeah it's a bit rubbish like that.

If you have the different albums in different folders on disc you can sort by path but then you'll often get them out of order as it doesn't then sort by track number - you'll just get an alphabetical sort which depends on the filename text.

With tracknumbers at the start of your filenames that means you normally end up with sorting like this:

1
11
12
13
2
3
4
etc

which is annoying but this is the closest thing I've found to solving the same problem myself